You’ve already humiliated yourselves, take some pity on Turkey!

Selçuk Gültaşlı

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his men, caught red-handed, declared to the whole world that they had prepared the infrastructure for the successful veiling of the evidence of their crimes.

In the meantime, those slammed with accusations of being agents, servants of Israel, traitors to the nation, viruses, bloodsuckers, vampires, etc., managed to maintain their composure, while laughing off the absurd allegations made against them. The only thing left to do was wait and see what Erdoğan and his circles would invent in an attempt to prove the non-existence of their crimes.

And then, around one year after the December operations, the results of the frantic preparations by the ruling party became clear: the “Tahşiyeciler” accusations. Undermined before it could even really begin, however, all the Tahsiyeciler case really showed us was just how innocent the accused were and how weak the government's “parallel state” accusations were. Little doubt Hidayet Karaca, when he was arrested on the morning of Dec. 14, 2014, might have said something like this to himself, “You've already humiliated yourselves, so at least take some pity on our country as a whole!”

And when top-level Justice and Development Party (AKP) members arrived in Europe to convince their counterparts that the allegations against Karaca were genuine, what they found were faces that reflected a full awareness of the lies they were being told. A chorus of AKP voices began recounting how coded messages from Fethullah Gülen to the police were being broadcast in a soap opera shown via Samanyolu Broadcasting Group (STV) and this was why Karaca was now in prison. They explained to their counterparts in Europe how the police had been under the control of Gülen long before Dec. 17, taking orders not from police commanders, but directly from Gülen himself. The natural question arose: If what you say is true and Gülen has the ability to give direct orders to the police, what need was there for coded messages over a TV series? These sorts of questions destroyed the poor AKP members, who were normally only accustomed to dealing with queries from pro-government media outlets.

A brief reminder is perhaps in order: Karaca is accused of broadcasting coded messages to the police through a very brief dialogue shown on a series on STV, all this because of a phone call sources claim he had with Gülen. Let's take time to note that both Karaca and Gülen deny that this phone call ever took place. Moreover, the alleged phone call was claimed to have occurred in 2013 but the series in which it is alleged to have been transmitted ended in 2011. But that's not all, the episode in which “Tahşiyeciler” was mentioned was aired in 2009 or put another way, a full four years before the phone call that allegedly took place between Karaca and Gülen.

In other words, Karaca has now been in prison for 134 days for theoretically directing an armed terrorist organization and because of a telephone conversation that the accusers claim took place in 2013, but of which there is no evidence. There is still no answer to Karaca's query to the judge the day he was arrested, asking, “What is the name of the terrorist group and where are the weapons you are talking about?”

But despite all this extreme oddity, the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office yesterday refused to comply with the court order to release Karaca.

Published on Today's Zaman, 27 April 2015, Monday